No knock on people who spend their time working on Free Software, but I genuinely don't understand why discussion threads turn sour so quickly when it comes to terminal emulators and ligatures. Both in the linked thread and in the case of libvte [1] (a terminal emulator widget used in tons of popular emulators) the maintainers seem to be aggressively against ligatures. It's a shame because I can't find a single terminal emulator on Linux that is as usable as iTerm2, and not having ligatures is the biggest knock against most of them IMO.
1: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=584160